FLIGHT INTO CAMDEN

An English novel by a young author of many talents which triumphs over a well- worn plot chiefly by the earnest reality of its writing and background. Margaret, the narrator, is the somewhat withdrawn, educated daughter of a Yorkshire miner, who meets a married man, Howarth, at her brother's local university and lets herself be drawn into an affair. Margaret later runs off to London with him, thinking that Howarth is planning to divorce his wife. Both the people and the situation are obviously banal and the book's virtue is that it makes this banality real in a peculiarly painful way. The passion that Howarth and Margaret finally achieve is the touching and profoundly physical meeting of two half-people who need each other but are ultimately defeated by the situation and by their own . Howarth, predictably, after endless discussions- ""In love enough justification?""- gives up and goes back to his wife and, like all weak men, leaves Margaret with only a final letter. It is one of those stifling, half-formed, first loves which most people try to forget a failure with little to redeem it save that it succeeded for a while.